Heinrich Göppert

Johann Heinrich Robert Göppert (25 July 1800 to 18 May 1884) was a German botanist and paleontologist, born in Sprottau in Lower Silesia and died at Breslau. In 1831 he became a professor of botany and curator of the botanical gardens in Breslau, and in 1852 director of the botanical gardens. He is particularly known for his work in paleobotany and wrote many articles in that field. He carried out extensive research on the formation of coal and amber and made comparison studies of living and fossil flora, and in 1840 he demonstrated the existence of plant cells in microscopic preparations of hard coal, which ended a long debate about the origin of coal. His private collection of fossil flora was considered the finest in the world, and in 1881 he issued a series of thin sections of fossil conifer woods titled Arboretum fossile. He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1861 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1862. He was a critic of Darwinism and published papers in 1864 and 1865 criticising the theory of common descent from botanical palaeontology. He was the father of a lawyer of the same name, grandfather of Friedrich Göppert and great-grandfather of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963.